Manage your subscription

Stardust’s pristine capsule set to be opened

By Maggie McKee

Workers examined Stardust’s sample return capsule at a clean room in Utah on Monday before sending it on to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, to be opened

(Image: NASA)

A capsule containing precious space dust from NASA’s Stardust mission is due to arrive at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, US, on Tuesday. The capsule, which appears to have survived its landing intact, is scheduled to be opened on Tuesday evening local time.

The capsule entered the atmosphere at a record 45,000 kilometres per hour and made a parachute landing in Utah’s salt flats at 1010 GMT on Sunday. The capsule bounced in the muddy soil several times after landing, coming to rest on its rim.

But unlike NASA’s solar wind collecting mission Genesis, which crashed in Utah in September 2004 after its parachutes failed to open, Stardust was barely bruised in the landing.

Advertisement

“The canister is closed tight – no dings, dents, or scrapes, and no loose aerogel,” says team member Scott Sandford of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, US.

Interstellar dust

That is important, as any damage to the capsule could have contaminated Stardust’s samples, which are embedded in a sponge-like substance called an aerogel. The samples include less than one-thousandth of an ounce of dust from Comet Wild 2, which it reached in January 2004, and about 45 grains of interstellar dust. Internet users can search aerogel images for the interstellar dust beginning in March in a project called Stardust@Home.

Comet Wild 2 now orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, but it spent billions of years in the Kuiper belt, a frozen reservoir of icy bodies beyond Neptune. While heat and geological processes have altered the inner planets like Earth beyond recognition, comets like Wild 2 are thought to be pristine samples of the gas and dust that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

After the initial examination of the capsule in Utah, the capsule was due to fly to Johnson Space Center on Tuesday morning. There, the capsule will be taken to a clean room more sterile than a hospital operating room and opened at about 0100 GMT on Wednesday.

Samples from the capsule will be sent to about 180 scientists around the world and the first will be distributed as early as next week.

The Stardust spacecraft was launched in February 1999. After releasing the sample return capsule to Earth, the mothership remains in orbit around the Sun. NASA may send it to photograph another comet or asteroid in the future.